Technicolor visual effects and animation chief Tim Sarnoff is getting a big promotion. The French entertainment and media technology company announced that Sarnoff will head the company's new production services group, effectively overseeing all of Hollywood's Technicolor operations, including the main office on Sunset Boulevard, as well as facilities at Paramount Pictures and in Burbank. Sarnoff's group combines two previously separate units -- creative services and digital productions -- and will represent all visual effects, post-production, animation, and digital cinema distribution worldwide.

The whimsical children's book "Pete & Pickles" tells the story of an unlikely friendship between two mismatched characters: a free-spirited circus elephant and a strait-laced pig. The theme also applies to the odd pairing of the book's author, the irreverent cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, with the buttoned-down French company that has bought the rights to his book. Technicolor, the longtime film processing company and world's largest producer of DVDs, is venturing into an improbable new business of producing animated TV series, starting with an adaptation of "Pete & Pickles" and, eventually, feature films.

In a further sign of film's exit from the Hollywood stage, the post-production company Deluxe said it was closing its local film laboratory. In a letter to customers, Warren Stein, chief operating officer of Deluxe Laboratories, said the Hollywood film processing facility will close May 9. "The capture and exhibition of motion pictures has transitioned from film to digital in recent years," Stein said in the letter obtained by The Times....

Technicolor has been a fixture since the early days of Hollywood. The company brought color to the big screen in such classics as "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz." When its pioneering "three-strip" color process fell out of favor, Technicolor reinvented itself as a successful film processor. The company later became a leading duplicator of VHS tapes and DVDs. Now, after 94 years of serving Hollywood, Technicolor Inc. has planted itself in the heart of Tinseltown, leaving its nondescript headquarters in an industrial neighborhood near Burbank Airport.

In a move to reduce its debt load, Technicolor said JPMorgan Chase & Co. would acquire as much as a 29% stake in the Paris-based media and entertainment technology company. Technicolor, which has a large digital services and postproduction operation in Hollywood, said the JPMorgan transaction and a related stock offering would reduce the company's debt by as much as 126 million euros (about $165.7 million), slashing annual debt service payments by 10 million euros ($13.2 million)

In a further sign of film's exit from the Hollywood stage, the post-production company Deluxe said it was closing its local film laboratory. In a letter to customers, Warren Stein, chief operating officer of Deluxe Laboratories, said the Hollywood film processing facility will close May 9. "The capture and exhibition of motion pictures has transitioned from film to digital in recent years," Stein said in the letter obtained by The Times....

The idea of draining the hues from a Technicolor film for commercial gain might seem an absurd takeoff on the colorization process (Calendar Letters, June 14). It has, however, happened. In the mid-1950s, the Warner Bros. Technicolor classic "The Adventures of Robin Hood" was reissued to theaters in black-and-white. It was largely these relatively inexpensive prints that found their way to television a short time later. As a result, I, like many people I know, grew up under the impression that the film was shot in black-and-white.

Regarding your article on the excavation of the Egyptian set of the 1923 "Ten Commandments" ("Solving Buried Riddle of a Hollywood Sphinx" by Paul Dean, Jan. 20): It was not the first use of Technicolor. The first Technicolor film, "The Gulf Between," was made in 1917, and the second, "Toll of the Sea" (1922) is currently being restored by the UCLA Film Archives. This, incidentally, was a two-color (red-green) process. According to a 1939 speech given to the Society of Motion Picture Engineers by Technicolor co-developer Dr. Herbert T. Kalmus, in order to interest Hollywood in the process they approached various companies with the idea of doing selected sequences and (director Cecil B.)

Elton John knows a thing or two about ostentatious outfits, f rom fringed jumpsuits to oversize sunglasses to sparkly sequined jackets. Now he can apply that expertise to a newly announced animated film adaptation of the hit musical "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. " John's Rocket Pictures announced Wednesday that it has acquired the film rights to the stage production by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice, which is based on the "coat of many colors" story from the Book of Genesis.

In the latest casualty of Hollywood's march to digital technology, Technicolor Inc., the French-owned film processing and post-production company, has closed its film lab in Glendale less than three years after its opening. The 40,000-square-foot-facility adjacent to DreamWorks Animation on Flower Street shut down Thursday, an employee at the lab told Times. A spokeswoman for Technicolor did not returns call seeking comment. ON LOCATION: Where the cameras roll Opened in 2011 , the facility replaced a much larger lab at Universal Studios that closed.

I couldn't disagree more strongly with Steven Zeitchik ["All in Black and White," July 14] when he writes, "Because most movies are now shot digitally, modern black and white does have a different look than it did in the 20th century, offering sharper and more vivid contrasts. " The issue with the current state of digitally shot and projected (particularly the latter) movies is that they simply cannot achieve true deep black — nor can they accurately depict shadow detail. For those who can't see this for themselves, I have come up with a very simple test that one can do on the next trip to a movie theater: Look at the movie screen.

The water, Esther Williams once quipped, was her favorite costar. With her beauty, sunny personality and background as a champion swimmer, Williams shot to stardom in the 1940s in the "aqua musical," an odd sub-genre of films that became an enormous hit with the moviegoing mainstream, fanned popular interest in synchronized swimming and turned Williams into Hollywood's Million Dollar Mermaid. The MGM bathing beauty, whose underwater extravaganzas made her one of the most popular actresses of the era, an idol in competitive swimming and a fashion force, died in her sleep early Thursday in Beverly Hills, said her publicist, Harlan Boll.

Even her dog could swim. That's one of my favorite memories from interviewing swimmer-turned-movie-star Esther Williams at her house in Beverly Hills in 1984. Williams, who died Thursday morning at the age of 91, was delightful talking about her fabled past at MGM. And of course her house had a pool - that's where her little terrier would dog paddle. Like many baby boomers, I grew up watching the former swimming champ's vastly entertaining MGM Technicolor musicals like 1944's "Bathing Beauty" and 1949's "Neptune's Daughter" on television, swooning over her extravagant, almost psychedelic swimming routines.

About "The Run on Robin Hood," July 26: If "The Adventures of Robin Hood" of 1938 was Warner's first Technicolor release, then who released "God's Country and the Woman" in 1937? "Robin Hood of El Dorado" was about Mexican bandit Joaquin Murietta. And because Kevin Costner is now reusing the title "Prince of Thieves," it would have been worthwhile to mention the 1948 release, which starred John Hall. Picayune maybe, but look, you're writing for Hollywood! BILL WOLFE Hollywood

Members of the "Damn Yankees" cast including Tab Hunter, Gwen Verdon and Jean Stapleton will appear at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences on July 15 prior to a screening of the film at 7:30 p.m. The event scheduled at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., is part of the academy's ongoing "Standard Screening Series." The film's original trailer and footage of the original stage version will be shown with a three-strip Technicolor print of "Damn Yankees."

As far back as Louis Lumière's 1895 "Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory in Lyon" 46-second short, work has been a central theme in motion pictures.There have been stark dramas about officer workers as drones (King Vidor's 1928 "The Crowd"), satires (Charlie Chaplin's 1936 "Modern Times"), angry explorations of the hardships of unemployment (John Ford's 1940 "The Grapes of Wrath") and the dangers of certain occupations (Ford's 1941 "How Green Was My Valley" about miners) or political statements such as 1979's "Norma Rae," which examined the struggle to unionize a factory.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has signed into law a bill which triples that state's post-production tax credit, a punch in the gut to Southern California's own film and TV community already struggling to keep business in the Golden State. The law increases the credit to 30% (35% for upstate New York), from 10%, on post-production costs and is the first of its kind in the country, said the Post New York Alliance, an association of film and television post-production facilities and labor unions operating in New York.